Popular Music Recent Picks

July 2004

The underlined titles will take you directly to our catalogue.
Some featured items are linked via a book cover to enable you to read more reviews.

	Very Short Films (DVD). "Flying Nun presents its very first DVD, titled VERY SHORT FILMS. It contains a mammoth 41 videos produced for Flying Nun Records artists from 2004 back to 1981. A lot of the video films feature the bands 'performing' direct to camera (with and without makeup), several of them have driving motifs, and plenty of 'em were made with extremely limited resources. Despite all this, the creativity and ingenuity on display is incredible and demonstrates a healthy progression of video-making in New Zealand over the last twenty odd years. All the fun times are captured and presented in a user friendly chronological format and test audiences have found the cameo-spotting to be an excellent source of enjoyment - not to mention the memories that were evoked upon viewing some of the rarer material." (Real Groovy)
	Anarchy in the UK: the stories behind the anthems of Punk. "Anarchy in the UK... examines the songs that encapsulated punk's radical message of dissatisfaction, anger and integrity. From the daddies of the scene - The Clash and the Pistols - through The Buzzcocks, The Stranglers, The Undertones and The Damned to the later, artier punk of Joy Division, Wire and The Fall (and not forgetting the American front of Ramones, Dead Boys and Blondie) this title dissects punk's nihilistic classic tunes." (Book cover)
	Rock'n'Roll Babylon by Gary Herman. Rock'N'Roll Babylon takes a tabloid like approach to the lurid, lascivious and hedonistic world of the debauched rocker. Shocking photographs, dubious tales and a heavy dose of scandal make this the perfect coffee table book for bored guests... er, unless Nana's coming over that is.
	Glastonbury Festival Tales by Christian Aubrey. "The first exhaustive, unbiased and completely illuminating account of the world's most famous rock and arts outdoor festival, with a foreword by Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis." (Publisher)
	33 1/3: Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott. 33 1/3 is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist's entire output, the books dispense with the standard biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives - often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music. (A task which can be, as Elvis Costello famously observed, as tricky as dancing about architecture.) What binds this series together, and what brings it to life, is that all of the authors - musicians, scholars, and writers - are deeply in love with the album they have chosen.

The Who: Biff! Bang! Pow! : interviews, reviews and rare phots, from the NME originals series.
Uncut magazine presents the latest in the NME originals series; a comprehensive collection of images and articles, mining the literature of past and present to provide you with all you ever wanted to know about The Who.

Escaping the Delta : Robert Johnson and the invention of the blues by Elijah Wald.
"Elijah Wald provides the first thorough examination of Robert Johnson's work and makes it the centerpiece for a fresh look at the entire history of the blues. He traces the music's rural folk roots but focuses on its evolution as a hot, hip African-American pop style, placing the great blues stars in their proper place as innovative popular artists during one of the most exciting periods in American music. He then goes on to explore how the image of the blues was reshaped by a world of generally white fans, with very different standards and dreams. The result is a view of the blues from the inside, based not only on recordings but also on the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, and original research. Wald presents previously unpublished studies of what people on Delta plantations were actually listening to during the blues era, showing the larger world in which Johnson's music was conceived. What emerges is a new respect and appreciation for the creators of what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music." (Book jacket)

Top Secret, directed by Jim Abrahams (DVD).
"In between the disaster movie satire Airplane! in 1980 and the hardboiled cop show parody The Naked Gun in 1988, the comedy crew of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker put together a picture that's almost as funny as their better-known hits. Top Secret! sends up spy movies and cheesy teen rock 'n' roll musicals. Val Kilmer stars as swivel-hipped American rocker Nick Rivers, a sort of blonde Elvis whose secret weapon is Little Richard's tune "Tutti Fruitti." On tour behind the Iron Curtain, Nick strikes blows for democracy overtly and covertly, with his music as well as his espionage skills. In short, this is a very, very silly motion picture. Some great gags, including a subtitled scene in a Swedish book shop, and an inspired bit with a Ford Pinto that not everybody may get anymore. (The Pinto, you may or may not recall, was notoriously prone to gas tank explosions when rear-ended.)" (Amazon)

Magic Circles by Bob Mason.
"This ground-breaking book shows how John Lennon and Paul McCartney turned pop song lyrics into private conversations, which gradually extended to other major songwriters of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. These 'magic circles' introduced radical ideas about sex, drugs and rebellion that were to transform popular music and culture in the 1960s... A fascinating combination of biography, history and cultural analysis, Magic Circles looks more deeply than ever before at what the Beatles were saying through their songs. It makes the Beatles, those familiar icons of popular culture, seem strange, wonderful and new." (Publisher)

The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone (DVD).
"Oliver Stone give us his take on the life of rock star Jim Morrison whose life came tragically to an end in a haze of drug abuse. The movie captures the psychedelic atmosphere of the Doors work, and particularly Jim Morrison's life - who is played by a very convincing Val Kilmer." (Real Groovy)

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